I've been using LK8000 for the last 8 months (and I love it)! I
placed well in 2 regionals and set 17 state records this year, all
while flying with LK8000 as my flight computer / nav system.

Here is my take on what's happening with LK8000 (keeping in mind that
I do not officially speak for the LK8000 developer and the following
statements are from someone who is not directly involved in the
development):

The LK8000 programmer originally was part of the XCSoar team.
However, changes in the person/people heading up XCSoar development
last year caused a rift amongst the people working on XCSoar. From
what I can tell, there were both political and technical issues.

The LK8000 programmer, not being able to make some desired changes to
XCSoar under the new regime, creates the LK8000 project as a way to
get these fixes & changes out to pilots. Along the way, the program
begins to change in many ways and the project grows in a lot of cool
new directions - such as FLARM support, a new Map & Topography format
(with faster load times and much greater detail). There is still a
lot of "XCSoar" at the heart of LK8000; but more and more of it is
being re-written and improved with each LK8000 release.

The GPL and the licenses covering XCSoar state that if you distribute
a program using XCSoar code, you must release the entire source-code.
The LK8000 developer does not want to do this, for various reasons
(including, IMHO, not wanting the new XCSoar developer to take the
work that was previously rejected and suddenly incorporate it into
XCSoar).

The person/people behind XCSoar these days have apparently made some
vague statements (possible legal threats) about LK8000 violating the
GPL and not sharing their code with the XCSoar team.

To reduce the controversy and retain control of LK8000 while all of
the new features and systems are being programmed & improved, the
LK8000 developer has chosen to release only alpha and beta test-
versions of the software to a limited group of people. My personal
opinion is that the motivation behind this is to avoid a direct
violation of the GPL by refusing to officially distribute the
program. However, the developer has made it clear that beta-testers
will not be prosecuted or "punished" if the program makes its way to
other people. The developer _is_ concerned about wide-spread use of
an "unfinished" product (although it is stable and fully usable).

As a result, there are people out there with download links and FTP
sites, giving away LK8000. The developer does not endorse this, but
seems to be OK with the fact that he cannot control what people do
with the program once they have it.

So the bottom-line is that you have to find someone who has the
program, and get a copy from them. The official Beta-testers will
probably always have the latest version, whilst other users may have a
slightly outdated version. (For example, Martin has 1.20i although
the latest version is 1.22b)

For more information, check out the LK8000 forums he
http://www.postfrontal.com/forum/default.asp?CAT_ID=11
And the LK8000 Manual he http://www.bware.it/LK8000/

Enjoy,

--Noel